


Reflections

by Potboy



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-11 21:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3332774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That story where Everett Young and Nicholas Rush meet Nicola Rush and Evelyn Young.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There's a flare outside the bridge windows that whites out the entire starscape for three seconds. The bridge erupts with the shrill voices of scientists who haven't yet decided whether they're fascinated or terrified. Something about gravity waves and 'extrusion of multidimensional pockets into n-space' and 'but that's impossible' and then their shuttle is hanging off the port bow, and someone who sounds eerily like Young's dead mother is telling them they need assistance with docking right now.

It's a slow, careful contralto voice, deep for a woman's, but rounded and ripe and warm. No one on the bridge can really bring themselves to believe it.

"I repeat, this is Colonel Evelyn Young. We've encountered some kind of phenomenon which seems to have drained our power. Destiny, we're going to need you to dock with us."

They say 'worse things happen at sea' but Young's not convinced.

He leans forward and toggles the comm. "This is Colonel Everett Young. I'm guessing your phenomenon's done more than drain your power. Hold position, we'll bring you on board."

"That was a girl version of you," says Eli, trying to look like he doesn't want to laugh out loud, and failing abysmally. "Oh my god. It's like the evil mirror world in Star Trek The Original Series. Do you think your girl version is evil? I don't think that follows but it would be so cool if--"

"Eli.” He raises his eyebrows to put an end to that rant. “Scott, you've got the con, bring her into shuttle bay two. Rush, what the hell happened?"

Young's kind of thrown by the idea of there being a girl him, to be honest, but it's been his experience that every single humiliating problem in the universe is less embarrassing if you just don't let your reaction show.

Rush is smirking too, but his face is bent down towards his monitor and it's hard to find a good reason to object to his smile. Young feels unsettled, and guilty for being unsettled by something so innocent. It shouldn't matter. Does he respect women less than he thought, then, if the thought of being one is so odd? It's hard to tell.

"There's a small naturally occurring fold in space at this point which - and I need to make it clear here that I'm making an educated guess – possibly ruptures the membranes between our two universes. In the multiverse all things that are possible exist, of course. But the chances of running into another version of us seem infinitesimal without some kind of causal mechanism."

Since she's actually here, the chances seem pretty high to him, but he's not going to argue the toss just for the sake of it. "Are we going to be able to send her back to her own universe?"

"That, I can't tell you as yet. I'll need to more carefully study the data. She may know something of use herself. Difficult though that is to believe."

Young quirks up the side of his mouth, because he thinks the little jab was meant to amuse. It's hard to tell with Rush, but sometimes the man is just teasing. It's taken Young two waking years to recognise it and even now he's still not entirely sure, but it's worth the benefit of the doubt.

There's no sense of movement as Scott plies the controls. The shuttle slips over the top of the windows out of view, and moments later he feels a tiny vibration through the deck beneath his feet as it settles into its cradle. "Docking clamps in place. OK, we're good to go, sir."

"Sergeant Greer? Take a team and meet me at shuttle bay two."

Young feels acutely on show as he walks down to the shuttle dock. All the civilians trail after him agog with curiosity, and Camile meets them from a cross corridor as they go. He’d rather not have had the audience, but he can't think of a good reason to tell them to stay put, and Scott's got the bridge, so...

Why is it so weird? Yeah, it had been odd to see his other self on the kino recordings from Novus. Embarrassing and awkward and a bit of a slap in the face to know what he looked like from the outside, without the benefit of the running internal commentary. That guy had looked like more of a jerk than he'd anticipated. But this is much worse. He feels raw, exposed. He's never going to live this down.

He clasps his hands behind his back and braces his shoulders, breathing in. Nods to Greer, who is armoured up and tooled up, ready for the unexpected. Greer points his rifle at the ceiling and hits the door release, and she ducks through.

He doesn't know what he expected but she's not it, in her black SGC uniform with the Icarus patch on the shoulder, a big-boned warhorse of a woman with his sister's eyes. She locks her hands behind her back and looks him up and down, and then both of them smile almost at the same moment. "Well, she says, "That's not so bad."

"Could have been worse," he agrees, because now he's looked her in the face it's clear. He'd been worrying that this would be some mockery of him, something that was humiliating on a fundamental level. But it isn't. It's just him as he would have been if he'd been born a girl, and that no longer seems like such a big deal.

"Welcome aboard, Colonel," he says. "We're already working on the question of how to send you home. I suggest you go with Rush and see if you can help him with that."

"You've got a Rush?" she asks, with something mischievous in her smile. All her expressions are a little more open than his. Or at least, he hopes his mouth wouldn't fall open quite like hers does when she lays her eyes on Rush. "And he's a man too."

"Yours isn't?" Rush is looking fascinated and gleeful, and not at all perturbed. "Is your whole crew the reverse of ours?"

"Well, that seems the most likely probability, doesn't it?" says a sweet Scottish voice and then Rush - female Rush - bobs under the shuttle's low rear door and shakes the long, brown hair out of her dark eyes.

She's... really quite pretty. Obviously still a western fan, she's got a cowgirl shirt on over a fitted white t-shirt, and a rodeo buckle on the belt of her blue jeans, and her pixie-like face is just brimming over with electric life.

"Doctor Rush," Young offers her his hand without thinking. He doesn't know what's gone on between girl-him and this woman, but it would be kind of nice to get along with one version, even for a little while.

She still does that thing where she looks at his hand like he's offering her a spider, and he takes note of the fact that she's also _very_ Rush. Then she shakes, and she even smiles at him, though he can't tell how much of it is pleasure at meeting him and how much is amusement at how weird this all is. She slides her eyes over to Rush, and it's him she's needling when she says "Oh, I think you can call me Nicola." But Young gets a glow of pleasure from the offer anyhow. Her hand is vivid in his.

A couple of other shuttle passengers venture out into the passage. Eli - Elly - makes a plump, vivacious girl, with her hands pressed over her mouth, jumping up and down with delight at the coolness. TJ...

Young's heart does something strange at the sight of TJ as a man. He's still beautiful - clean cut and tall, his blond hair shorn short. The formidable strength that most people don't suspect in TJ is more visible in him, but there's a familiar gentleness in the set of his hands. Young looks between this young Adonis and his female self and wonders if they... Because she's twice his age and he's way out of her league, and it's kind of distasteful to think...

And then he catches himself and he's ashamed.

Evelyn gives him a look, long and level and bland. She knows what he's thinking. Of course she does, and there's no way an apology wouldn't just make everything worse, so he steps out of her way, inviting her to take point on the walk to the bridge. “After you.”

“A moment,” she retreats into the shuttle, stoops to pick up a kit bag. She handles it the way he handles explosives - deft, unhurried and careful as hell. He's going to ask what it is, whether he wants it on his ship, when it giggles, and a little hand grabs the unfastened opening and pulls.

Young's chest freezes solid. There's no way to swallow or even to breathe. He's distantly aware that Eli is looking at him, but he can't... all his thoughts have stopped and he can't make anything connect back up. “Is that--”

She hugs the bundle more firmly into the crook of her elbow like she’s cradling a rifle and looks at him like she can tell something's wrong but she doesn't know what it is. Doesn’t know whether she needs to protect _her child_ from him. And maybe she does. Maybe she does.

He needs to get his own TJ up here right now. She'll never forgive him otherwise.

“His name’s Bryce,” says Evelyn, and he hates her. He fucking hates her, and that's not fair, not worthy, because it's not her fault, but.

“Is there a problem?” she presses, her arms tightening around the child. “Did you not have--”

How could she not know what the problem is? The whole god damn multiverse ought to know. The fucking deck plating under her feet should cry out in protest. “She didn't make it.”

Everyone looks at him, careful, like he's going to lose it right there, and for a long moment he doesn't have a clue what to do now, how to go forward from this. Then Camile touches his arm, and dully he thinks _Right, well it's out in the open now, isn't it?_

In a small, callous corner of his mind he's got time to worry about Camile finally making an official report up the chain, like she'd been raring to do on Icarus. If he gets the dishonourable discharge he so rightly deserves, how much is that going to screw things up here on Destiny, now they've actually started to make things work?

She still can't prove anything, though.

“This seems like something you need to discuss in private,” Camile sounds sympathetic. There's not even a hint of 'I told you so' or 'You are such a shit, Everett Young, and I'm going to see you get broken for it.' That makes it worse somehow.

“I'll take your bridge shift.” She turns with a brisk smile, “Nicola, Nicholas. Eli, Elly... I'm sure you have a great deal of science to do to make sense of all of this. Shall we?” She ushers them away, a little pointed but gracious, and it's not the first time recently that he's thought how grateful he is she's on board.

Young shows his visitors into his quarters with a hollowness inside like he's swallowed a black hole. It's a familiar feeling but not usually this intense, and he doesn't think that alcohol will cut it this time, when what he really wants is to jam the barrel of a pistol up underneath his jaw and pull the trigger.

He's not going to do that. He doesn't deserve to get what he wants.

TJ skids round the corner, running at full pelt, ricochets off the wall and has to brace herself against the desk while she catches her breath, watching with wide, hungry eyes while Evelyn puts the kit bag down on the bed and lifts out a sturdy baby boy, about a year old. He's in a grey jumpsuit made out of someone's exercise t-shirt, bare feet. He's got a head of curly blond hair and brown eyes and he reaches out for TJ in blithe confidence when she edges closer.

“You wanna hold him?” says Evelyn, and lifts him up, “Bryce's used to being handed around. I got a ship full of eager babysitters and plenty of reason to use them.”

Tamara's got one hand stretched out, almost touching the baby's head. The other is curled into a fist and pressing hard into the scar on her stomach. Her male counterpart gasps and echoes the gesture. “You were shot too. In the Lucian Alliance attack. But Eve was pregnant then. _You_ were pregnant then. Oh my God.”

“Here,” Evelyn stands up and plunks the boy into Tamara's arms. She's stiff as the dead a moment longer, and then the tears spill from her welling eyes and she's clutching the child to her and rocking over it like it was her own.

“'Bryce'?” Tamara says after a long time of speechlessly weeping over the boy's head. He seems to be a pretty placid child. He doesn't object to this, just wriggles enough so he can reach up and try to undo the firm twists of her hair.

“My grandfather's name,” says Evelyn gently, because of course, she's the mother, she'd be the one who got to choose. Her TJ would be the one who had to stand back and pretend hard, until he'd half convinced everyone around him, that he didn't give a damn.

“How the hell were you not cashiered for this?” he asks and he's harsh and he's brutal and he fucking hates that but this hurts and he doesn't know what else to do but be angry about it.

Evelyn reacts with a withering smile, unimpressed, and yes he shouldn't have expected any attempt to intimidate himself to go over well, but he still wants an answer.

“You think it was easy?” she says, “Pregnant, on this ship, with Rush and Wray trying to take over? In the middle of a divorce? I told a lot of lies, and mostly people went along with them. Couple of instances of people walking in on the Colonel crying her eyes out into a bulkhead, and people soon figured out I needed help. Course, it helps that the crew's almost eighty percent female.”

Maybe Young should have done his crying in public, he thinks bitterly, except it doesn't work that way for men. You're a man and you let people know you're weak, they savage you. They sure as hell don't help you.

That's old school thinking, though. The kind of thinking Young was raised with – gotta be invulnerable or they'll take you down. If you're hurt or in pain, don't ever let them know. That's what his father had believed. But the truth was that when he'd started asking for help, started accepting it, from Camile, from Scott, even from Rush, that was when the situation on board started to turn around. Good for her, then, if she'd arrived at that solution earlier.

“Is he a good baby?” Tamara says, maybe to break up the tension. Bryce is standing on her knees now, with both hands tugging at her hair, his round little face frowning in concentration. He looks so much like TJ that it stops Young's heart. TJ herself is almost smiling. “What do you do for diapers?”

“There's a kind of moss—”

And Young can't bear this any more. He can't bear to stand by and watch them talk babies like they've all forgotten that none of this – none of it – is going to make his daughter any less dead.

“I'm going to see how the Rushes are doing.” He hits the door release, aware that he's running away and not giving a damn. All three of them look at him like they're disappointed, but it's go talk to Rush or go to the still, and he knows which is the responsible choice.

Besides, he kind of wants to punish himself at the moment, and for that, Rush is always a good option. It probably goes double when there's two.


	2. Chapter 2

Rush doesn't so much ditch the Wallaces as mislay them. The four of them are on their way down to the control interface room, in reflective silence on his part, and he's peripherally aware of Eli continuing to gush about how exciting this is, and how 'omg! You know if you just cut back on the Cheetos, you'd be a babe!'

It seems relief is the order of the day on meeting yourself in a different sex. Young had had the same reaction. It's curious. He wonders what terrible fate they'd been envisaging that makes this so much better.

There is squealing about documentaries and footage. Apparently Elly has found some kind of special effects programme that Eli wants to try out immediately, and between one pop culture reference and another they've gone. Probably headed for Eli's squalid little cubbyhole among the kinos. He's left with himself... herself. Nicola.

"Presumably our universes are aligned," he says, though thinking out loud even to himself feels risky. "There's nothing on this side that would account for the rupture. Was there on yours?"

"We'd just detected a pulsar," says Nicola. She comes into the CI room beside him and they both head for the same console - his console. He gives her a look to warn her off. Future Rush, the one from the time when Telford successfully destroyed the ship, would have bristled, retaliated, and he would have understood that. It disturbs him to see her react with a little scoff and back off.

"It's possible that the gravity fold is concentrating the pulsar's flare like a lens and the resultant focussed energy is enough to create a brief puncture from one reality to the next. I'll have to..."

_Run the numbers._

"Yes, yes. Of course." He bends to his own console to do just that. "What period?"

"Every 22 hours 6 minutes 57 seconds."

"Focussed where?"

"Well," she sounds amused and condescending, fuck her. "I would imagine where the shuttle first appeared, wouldn't you?"

And perhaps that had been too obvious to need stating. Even so, he doesn't appreciate the tone.

"So in 21 hours 18 minutes and 32 seconds we make sure you're all at that point, in the shuttle and this situation will rectify itself."

"That's my thought."

He radios Brody, because mechanical issues are the man's speciality and Brody is in fact acceptably competent. "Mr Brody, please take whoever will be of most assistance and see to it that our guest's shuttle is re-powered. You have 20 hours to complete any repairs."

"I'm on it."

"So," Nicola drapes herself against a console in what he doesn't want to think of as a provocative pose, but which he can't help noticing does show off the curves of hip and her small breasts. She's watching him watch her and she's having a deep private laugh at his discomfiture. He quirks his mouth in response. Fine, yes. If he had a figure with which to disconcert and distract people, he probably would. "Nothing to do but talk."

"I've no need for a heart to heart today."

Anything he says, she's going to second guess. That's how his mind works. It's wearisome enough inside himself without replicating the circumstances externally. Still, he's also burningly curious. "What's it like?" he says, "Being a woman?"

She laughs. "Well, it's not like I have an opposing frame of reference from which to judge. But I can tell you this, if you think you had it hard as a piss-poor Glaswegian maths prodigy, imagine doing the whole thing again while you're also fighting to prove that - as a woman - you're capable of higher reasoning at all."

"You probably got by by doing that." He nods at her sensuous posture, very at odds with the sharp anger that has flicked to life in her eyes.

"I used every resource at my disposal," she half agrees, making him feel ashamed for expecting otherwise. Of course she would. This is him they're talking about. Give him different weapons, he'd still fight just as hard.

But that reminds him, as if he'd needed a reminder, because in fact he's been dwelling on it ever since Evelyn Young stepped off the shuttle. "Did she knock you out then, that woman, and leave you for dead, on a dead world in the middle of nowhere, to be abducted by aliens?"

Mercurial, she's suddenly smiling again, though what there is to smile about, in the way he's been abused aboard this ship, he doesn't know. Maybe she had it better. Maybe she finds his attempts to prove he's had it worse than her just as pathetic as he finds them, now he comes to think about it.

"She got the crew together and she showed them Elly's recording of how I framed her for murder. They shunned me for a time, after which I was beaten up by some of the girls from the marines. That convinced Armstrong and Wray that I had had good reason to attempt to make sure a civilian was in charge, and there was something of a bloodless coup.”

Nicola twists her mouth into a smile that conveys a whole discourse about the stupidity of humanity in general, and possibly of men in particular. “But Armstrong and Wray were too busy fighting over who took precedence to mount any kind of coherent defence, so the Colonel successfully overcame that little fracas in about half an hour."

“So you were never taken by the aliens?” Rush doesn't know what he feels about this, settles on surprise, because that should surely have had far reaching consequences that lead to Destiny being destroyed by Drones in the space graveyard.

“Oh but I was.” She likes being in possession of more information than him, but he supposes he can't blame her for that. “Many years before we arrived on Destiny, they had left a tracking device on the ship. It alerted them when we arrived. Some time later they took Armstrong and I out of our quarters to study.” She scoffs, fondly. “That was a wake up call for the poor wee lad, and no mistake.”

"It's remarkable," Rush does not think about what it would have been like to be rescued from that watery hell by a Young who hadn't put him there in the first place. He doesn't think of it, but it's not hard to imagine how she would have reacted. He has a case study in Chloe, after all. Chloe who hated him before that moment, and who afterwards became his unswerving ally.

But he's not thinking about that. "It's remarkable how tightly we seem to have adhered to a very similar timeline. Almost as if there was a structure we were intended to pursue, and when we deviated from it we were continually guided back."

She gives him the full beam of a smile. It makes her very familiar face do something quite strange. "Or by mere accident we simply come from similar parallels. Just because we haven't met more outre ones doesn't mean they're not out there."

Right. He knew that, of course. Well, he's had quite enough humiliation for one day. Time to go and speak to someone who isn't going to make him feel quite such a fool. He knows just the person.

~

Rush is passing the hydroponics dome on the way to the Colonel's quarters, when the sound of a child's delighted crowing laugh makes his step falter. He's no great fan of children, on the whole, but the entire ship had anticipated the coming of Lt. Johansen's baby, and even he is curious.

The woman herself almost knocks him down as she half jogs through the doors, her head turned back over her shoulder, not looking where she's going. "Dr. Rush, I'm sorry," she says, with her hair standing up like a blown dandelion, and a flush on her cheeks, and a smile that looks a trifle less ground down than usual. "I'm late for my shift at the infirmary." But she's still not looking in his face, still preoccupied by what she's leaving behind.

"Well don't let me stop you," he says, and walks on in.

He's no great lover of nature either. Gloria used to be fond of it. Hill walks and hearty rambling and views, and Rush trailing along after her with his head full of mathematics. But it is pleasant to be somewhere where the air is full of moisture and leaves nod in passing currents against the racing star trails overhead.

It's Evelyn Young who sits on the bench amid the white and yellow flowers of the tomato plants. She's watching Bryce haul himself to his feet by the edge of the raised beds and creep crablike sideways along them, pausing every now and again to suck on his soil covered fingers.

"Should he be doing that?" Rush finds himself asking, evidently not as immune to interfering with other people's parenting as he would have hoped.

Evelyn looks up at him as if she too finds him amusing, though it's a softer expression on her face than it was on Nicola's. There's less scorn under it. "TJ says eating a bit of soil's good for them at that age."

He can't help noticing that she's a handsome woman, almost exactly his own height, her thick, wavy black hair tied back in a bun like James's. She shares other attributes with James, but he thinks he gets away with noticing once and afterwards tries not to look.

"It's odd," she says, "Seeing you as a man. The beard? I like it."

So she's checking him out too.

It feels as if a breeze has curled through the room. Its chill slides up his back and rubs the hair on the nape of his neck the wrong way, as all kinds of blurry unseen things begin to come into focus.

Rush remembers that you ought to say 'thanks' to that kind of observation long after the time to say it has passed. "You, ah. you make a good woman. Very..." Where are his words when he needs them most? "Statuesque."

He means 'queenly', because she has a quiet stateliness to her that he finds soothing. Something that reminds him that knowledge is not necessarily to be preferred over wisdom. Something that reminds him, with a throb of deep anguish that is somehow still a comfort, of Gloria.

He can't talk to her like a stranger, even though they've never met before. Sitting next to her, with his knees inclined away from her, his body is ever so slightly tilted towards. "All sorts of things about you seem more forgivable in a woman."

She laughs and looks at him sidelong from golden-hazel eyes. "Watch where you're going with that, Rush."

"I don't mean anything insulting by it, I assure you. Only that it's more expected for a woman to favour individuals over the generality. It's expected that she should care too much. I'd never thought of you as a mother before, but it makes a great deal of sense."

She shakes her head, lifting her eyes to the FTL trails as if imploring them to give her strength. "What the hell does that mean? Is this you gender stereotyping me, or are you just saying, what? That you only just realized you liked me, now I'm a girl?"

She's still Young. That's what surprises him so much about this. Just as the colonel sometimes does, she's somehow come to the same answer as him, even though she probably can't show her workings, and if she could they'd certainly be wrong. Has he liked Young all along, then? Has he really become so very conditioned that he didn't notice until it was wrapped up in a package he felt permitted to admire?

"I don't know what your relationship to your Rush is," he starts, inviting her to elaborate.

Her smile is a mischievous thing, which is interesting, because to his knowledge if there's any mischief at all in Young's soul it's buried extraordinarily deep.

"Passionate," she says.

And oh dear Lord, that was the very word. Right from the start, from when Young couldn't open his mouth without it raising Rush's hackles and setting his blood athunder in his ears, 'passionate' has been the word he's been trying not to think.

Intense, would be another. Significant. Potent. Overwhelming.

"But ours has been, not to put too fine a point on it, shite."

She lunges forward to take a hazel cob out of Bryce's tight clutching fist. “Hey, kiddo, what did we say about nuts? Not ‘til you can chew. Here.” She offers him a yellow pumpkin flower instead, which the child stuffs in his mouth and sucks. He's a grubby mite and Rush approves.

"All the more reason to improve it now, right?"

Right, of course. It's that easy. Rush settles back to rest and lets the timed misters raise a wistful scent of watered soil around them both. Funny how this has felt like they've both been continuing a conversation they've been having for years. Idly, he wonders if he can keep her here and send his Young back in her place. Maybe not. He has the feeling certain members of the crew might object violently to that. Plus it probably counts as missing the point.

He certainly has a lot to think about, but for now it's pleasant to sit quiet next to this still pool of a woman and let himself be soothed. Taking apart and reassembling his entire framework of self-perception, while resolving a past of murder and other catastrophic decisions? That can wait until the morning.


	3. Chapter 3

The bridge is calm, ticking over, with Camile in the chair and no sign of either Rush. Young swings by Eli's room and interrupts a furious discussion about the merits of Batman - which Elly maintains is 'like, dripping in man-pain with a side order of fridging'. Eli can scarcely get a word in, but his counter argument appears to consist only of 'but it's so cool', so it's probably just as well. Young thinks the boy should quit before he's any deeper in the hole, but it's a learning experience so he doesn't say so.

“So,” he leans against the door and regards the two of them with a dogged lift of spirits. Elly has pigtails, and a knitted cardigan covered with small black dogs wearing red bows. It's cute, but it really brings it home how young the kid is to be so extraordinary. “Any news on how to get our guests back to their own universe?”

“Well...” they start together, and then their sentences are tumbling over each other like a litter of puppies in a box.

“We went into the CI room half an hour ago,”

“Which is where we left the Rushes.”

“They weren't there, but there were some calculations on a console?”

“We think it was a pulsar? In which case it's going to come back on a regular basis.”

“So--”

Elly holds on to one pigtail as if to stop her head from floating away. “I realized the shuttle would need recharging so--”

“I got on to Brody. And apparently Rush had already told him to start work on it.” Eli raises both hands in a kind of 'and there you go' gesture.

“Which means?” Young asks, because a loose hand signal is not enough of a positive verbal confirmation for him to work on.

“Which means everything's under control. We'll return them to the spot in space they came from in about 20 hours, and they should be able to pop right back through to their own reality.” Eli swivels back around to his kino display console, which shows Chloe walking back from the bridge to her quarters. The shift has just changed.

“In the mean time, we can chat. I'm going to take Elly and Tamar to meet Chloe, and then we're going to go troll the mess. It's going to be a blast.”

Fair enough. Young bets the entire crew are seething with curiosity by now. It'll be a good distraction from the food, at least, and they might just find out something useful.

“Knock yourselves out,” he says, and then - hopefully casually - "You see where either Rush went?"

"Nope," Eli says with a shrug. "The pair of them are probably figuring out how to populate the ship with an army of Rushes so they don't need us any..." His eyes go wide at the same time that Elly claps her hands over her mouth and gives a shocked giggle. "OK, implications I hadn't thought through. How about we forget I ever said that."

So, Young can apparently downgrade this situation to 'shit that only needs enduring for a bit longer and then will sort itself.' That's good news. It's less good news that the Rushes have wandered off, together or apart. While it's been a long time since he felt the need to know where Rush was at every hour of the day, he still feels a dull roar of conditioned fury like an after-taste on the back of his tongue.

Maybe he's not in the best mood to deal with either Rush right now.

Instead, he collects work-out kit, goes down to the marines rec room, where someone has made a punchbag out of duct tape wound tight around a cut up hard Ancient mattress over a core of large stones. There's a pure, visceral relief in smacking the stuffing out of it until he tears up the bandages he's wrapped around his hands. A drink of water, he re-wraps his aching hands and starts again, working the bag over until he's calm enough to start checking his form, practising combinations, turning this from therapy into exercise. Until he’s calm enough to think again instead of feeling.

Bruised knuckles are a small price to pay for the blessed sense of clarity, of having drained every pressure off, that comes when he's done.

A shower later and normally he'd head to the mess hall for dinner, but the wish to find Rush has not disappeared along with his black mood, so he decides to swing past the other inhabited areas on his way there. See if he can bump into her by accident. It feels like they have a lot to talk about, somehow. Maybe this is a chance to have a conversation they've long put off.

He catches himself smoothing his hair back with water, like he's bracing himself up to something big - asking a girl out, or sitting in the chair. Something for which he needs moral support. He's not even going to pretend that it's not Nicola he's hoping to find.

Weird though that is, when you think about it.

She's in the observation deck, standing as if at the very prow of the ship, where the universe can pass over her in scarves of starlight. He tries to remember that he doesn't know her, but it's hard when she turns around with exactly Rush's expression of transcendent wonder at the mysteries of the cosmos, an expression that elides into amused cynicism at the sight of him easy as a piece of music changes key.

Shit, it's been staring him in the face all this time. How could he not have seen?

"I think I've been pretty stupid," he confesses, coming up close beside her because he can't stay away. And how many times has he done this to Rush, crowding into his personal space without realizing why?

Nicola's smile rounds the apples of her cheeks and makes her small, triangular face more elf-like than ever, especially with the hint of sly laughter in its nightshade eyes. "I'm quite sure you're right about that. Are you speaking generally, or is there a specific instance that comes to mind?"

He puts an elbow on the rail beside her and has to laugh. “You're very like him.”

“Not surprising, as I _am_ him.”

Really he's dying to know everything, from the very beginning, and he'd maybe get a more reliable account from Evelyn, but he doesn't want to hear her side. Her side, he can guess. It's Nicola who fascinates him and offers him a skeleton key to the locked box mystery that is Dr. Nicholas Rush.

“OK,” he shrugs. He doesn't know where to start, and with the way she's leaning back, elbows hooked over the rail, chest arched outwards, it's kind of hard to concentrate. Wild stab in the dark it is, then. “What's it like over on your ship? How do you two get along?”

She draws her hair over one shoulder and reaches up to plait it. It looks soft. A great deal softer than the sharp glint in her eye. She's having a lot of fun at his expense, making him look, but that's OK, because he's quite enjoying it too.

“Elly and I?” she asks, the laughter in her gaze barely concealed at all. “Oh, splendidly, thank you for asking.”

“You know what I'm talking about.”

She angles her head to the side with a grimace. “But it's so much fun to make you work for it.”

He thinks he's watching her pretty damn narrowly but it still takes him by surprise when she leans forward and places her hand flat in the centre of his chest. Everything stills except for his heart, which hammers against her palm. When has Rush ever voluntarily touched him? He can't remember. The guy seems pretty touch averse, and this feels like the end of the world.

“Why are you not with your child?” says Nicola. Her eyes are on him with a kind of clean, clinical detachment, but her voice is sympathetic. It's not fair. He doesn't know what to make of this, because Rush is nobody's councillor. Rush does not concern himself with other people's mental states.

Unless they're Eli. Or Chloe. Or Amanda Perry. Or someone else that he actually cares about. At the implication, he goes from off balance, through disbelieving and out into to _touched_ like slipping down a slide.

“He's not my child.”

“Of course not,” Nicola scoffs. “And when he's gone you won't regret that you had the chance to hold him, but you were too scared. You won't regret that you chose to run away and waste all the time you have left in this universe together.”

It's such an un-Rush thing, but it's said with such vehement certainty, and the idea of Rush with emotions, Rush talking to him about love and loss and regret, it's not what he expected at all. “Okay,” he says, mostly because he wants to please her, to take away that look of ruin in her eyes. If he doesn't help Rush, after all, who the hell will?

“Okay. I'll try again with him before you go home. Are you going to answer my question now, or should I move on to another one?”

“Good.” She pushes herself off the rail and circles him. There are gold spiral earrings in her ears, and their glint emphasizes the length and delicacy of her throat. She's really quite lovely, and he's fairly sure she knows it.

“We're doing fine now, the colonel and I,” she admits. “Better than fine, to be honest.”

“You hide the bridge from her?”

“Why would I?”

Interesting question. “I don't know. You told me it was for the sake of the crew, because I wasn't up to the job, but you were yelling at me the week before about torture, how I left you with the Lucian Alliance. So I think you were still pissed at me about that. I think it was personal, you know?”

The look of friendly teasing has ebbed out of Nicola's face. It's sober enough now for him to see the wrinkles, the worn skin around her eyes, and the shadows in the hollow of her cheeks. He wouldn't have put _her_ through that either. It had just seemed more excusable with Rush. Because on the one hand Rush had volunteered and he was a scary motherfucker who could look after himself, and on the other, there was David, his best friend, coerced, brainwashed, robbed of his own soul and full of vital info that might have saved everyone on Earth if he could only be brought back to himself and induced to spill it.

Young had felt trapped, desperate, throughout the entire incident - condemned to betray one of them whichever one he chose to save. He'd been cracking up for a long time, but that was maybe the point where the fractures finally got so wide they started to show.

“How did she deal with it then, Evelyn?”

Nicola gives him a merciless smile. “She killed us both straight away. Broke the brainwashing while I was still unconscious during the transport. Got Telford to confess everything she knew and sent her back in time to keep her cover. She still fucked everything up in the invasion, but I didn't blame Eve for that.”

Typical. He should have been more ruthless. Quicker. More decisive. Well, he knew all that already. He'd known it at the time, yet he couldn't force himself to follow through.

“Riley's alive?”

“Sergeant Diane Riley? Yes, she's said to have a charmed life, the number of near misses she's had, but yes. Not here?”

Young shakes his head. Unlike the misery over Bryce, the thought that Riley is still alive in another universe is purely comforting. Evelyn doesn't see those light-filled staring eyes every time she falls asleep? Good for her. “So you two have been getting on okay since after the mutiny?”

That's hopeful. If they can do it, there's no reason why he and Rush can't, unacknowledged sexual tension notwithstanding. What they do about _that_ part of the deal is a separate issue entirely. He's still having trouble wrapping his mind around it, to be honest, though other parts of him seem very much in favour.

Nicola laughs, in mockery or delight. “It's gone well beyond 'getting on okay' by now.” She paces away from him, always in movement, always astir with brilliance and fervour. Then she wheels and comes back, right up into his space and still pushing forward, with challenge and mischief and pure intellectual curiosity in her black-coffee eyes. She grabs him by the back of the head and kisses him soundly, and it's a little like getting punched in the teeth, but there's no way he's going to complain.

It lasts a bare fleeting instant, and he's still failing to believe that it's happening at all when it's suddenly over. He tries reaching out for her, but she's already dancing away.

“Uh uh! Get your own.”

“What was that about?” he says - rhetorically, obviously, he just has no idea how to feel about it and would like to be given a clue.

Nicola's shit-eating-grin is so wide it scarcely fits on her face. “I think she'd agree that I had to see. Once, for experimental purposes. But I'd better not make a habit of it. Of course, if she reacted to jealousy by pushing me up against a wall and ravishing me, it might be a different matter. But she doesn't. She just gets withdrawn and despondent, and it's really not worth the trouble.”

Young is speechless for a moment more, and then a very familiar horrified joy comes bubbling up out of the pit of his stomach and makes him smile. “God damn it. You're even more work than my Rush, aren't you?”

She takes it for a compliment. Of course she does. They both know that by this stage, it _is._ “But oh,” she says, “I'm worth it.”


	4. Chapter 4

And then it's the morning and they're saying goodbye. As it turns out, there was a pulsar on their side of the equation too, whose spike of radiation is also focussed by the gravity lens upon that same spot in space. It's the combined forces that denature the fabric of the universe at that point, via a mechanism that Volker is looking into at this very moment.

Rush’s perverse mind insists on throwing up an image of what Volker might be like as a woman - plump and blonde and clammy, slightly hopeless. It's not a pretty thought. He's glad to lean his shoulder against the curve of the corridor, at the back of the party and raise his eyebrows in a farewell acknowledgement of Nicola.

_Indeed_ , it says, _you do exist_. Which seems to be all that’s necessary in the end.

Young, of course, is making a meal of the entire experience. Rush's eyes linger on the little bubble of space where Young and Evelyn are shaking hands.

Bryce is standing between them - if you can call it standing. It's evident he has to cling tight to his mother's trousers to keep his legs from buckling, and he has one arm firmly wrapped around her knee, while the thumb of the other hand is in his mouth.

Nicola gives Young a pointed look. As he nods back, Rush wonders whether he found the same hard-won communion with Nicola as Rush found with Evelyn. It seems only reasonable to suppose so, and the world around him is embittered suddenly with a dark flash of some emotion that he...

Oh it's jealousy. How bizarre. He has nothing to be jealous about, but he'll still be glad to see the back of Nicola. One Rush is all any one universe could possibly need.

Young's kneeling now. "Hey buddy," he says, reaching out for Bryce as if he expects his hand to pass straight through. He touches the boy's head like he's trying not to damage a cobweb. Even Rush can tell it's far too gentle to be reassuring. In fact it's so gentle it must tickle, because Bryce giggles and swipes at his hair with the arm that had been supporting him.

Clearly the intellectual ability has been handed straight down.

Young catches the boy as he falls, and holds him under the armpits awkwardly for a moment as if he doesn't know what he's allowed to do next. Then he turns his face aside in a vain attempt to hide, and gathers the child in. Both arms come up as he hugs Bryce to his chest and presses his cheek to the boy's hair.

Young shudders. He's trying to hold himself together but he's breathing as if he's in pain. That's the point where Rush finally realizes this is too private to watch and turns away.

They're bleeding together in his mind a little already, Evelyn and Everett Young. He hadn't really given thought to what fatherhood might mean to the man. Nothing, he'd supposed. An inconvenient reminder of a reckless and stupid indiscretion. A living proof that he could not make a good decision if someone else's life depended on it.

But seeing this, having met Evelyn and realized that streak of ferocious motherliness explains so much about her, the whole incident with the child abruptly wrings his heart.

When the talk began about Lt. Johansen's baby and its father, Rush had felt savagely vindicated. He'd wanted to tell everyone “see! This man you all so spinelessly follow callously used a woman under his protection, and then abandoned her, having ruined her life. Why can't you see? He's not fit to clean out the latrines, let alone lead this mission.”

He hadn't, of course. There were some kinds of dirt even he didn't choose to stir.

Evidently, that had been a somewhat simplistic reading of a situation more complex and heartbreaking. Watching the man struggle not to burst into tears over a child he had obviously wanted brings the tragedy of it home to Rush. This is all still too undisciplined, too messy, sordid and emotionally compromised for his liking. But it's clear from the way Lt. Johansen's face has brightened, and some indefinable stiffness has gone out of Young's shoulders that the child is bringing them all peace.

Well, it's their business isn't it? Not his.

"Thanks," Young wipes his face on his sleeve before reluctantly handing Bryce to his mother. She lowers him into the kit bag she brought him in and slings it over her shoulder.

"You must visit us some time." Evelyn looks over his shoulder to catch Rush's eye. He's trying not to gaze stupidly back – he has his dignity to think of – but the thought piques his interest. If he analyses Volker's data, there might be an artificial way of replicating this little pinhole between worlds. It'll bear looking into.

"Sure," says Young, in a gruff and not particularly convincing attempt at normality. "If we can. Take care of yourselves."

Rush doesn't wave. It would be inane. And when the shuttle gate clangs to behind them, he turns and walks away as if he has better things to do. He hasn't really come to any conclusions in the last twenty hours, but it does occur that if he and Young had got together the way Evelyn and Nicola have, and if Young's child had lived, he might even now be a sort of father himself to the bairn.

What a terrifying thought.

"Crazy uncle," he mutters to himself, letting the aura of bereavement slip away and normal life replace it. He would have been fine with being Carmen's crazy uncle Rush. And in another universe, a happier place, maybe he yet is.

Scratching at his beard reveals it's beginning to grow bushy again. He should really go and give it a little trim.

The smile seems to break out of him of its own accord. For no real reason, he feels lighter than he has in years. It's an effort not to whistle as he heads for his room.

He has no idea why he finds it reassuring to know there was real love involved under even the least demonstrative of Young's relationships. He supposes he's pleased for Lt. Johansen's sake, and why not? It's not as though he's completely devoid of empathy. Anything that improves that mess must be a good thing. Why should there be more to it than that?

~

Rush picks the scab off that thought about a week later, because although his first instinct is to fool himself, his restless mind won't ever let anything alone until it's solved for good.

Plus, there is a large lurking clue in the form of Young, who seems to have been shadowing him for the past few days. Not doing anything. Just _being there_ unexpectedly. Occasionally asking him how he's doing in a quiet, casual way. Occasionally asking him _what_ he's doing, in a manner more of interest than of suspicion. Just _watching_ Rush, like he's the most fascinating thing aboard, like Young can't believe it took him this long to notice.

It's almost like the old days, though pleasanter, and the sense that they are playing a private little game that neither of them dares openly acknowledge amuses Rush. It amuses him right up to the point where they're lingering together at the end of a bridge shift, waiting for their replacements to arrive, and he can't help revisiting the thought, prying it back up.

Suppose hypothetical person (a) is interested in an intimate relationship with hypothetical person (b), yet (a) believes that (b) is faithless, predatory, uncaring. Wouldn't it also come as a relief to person (a) _for their own sake_ , to discover that (b) was suffering from an excess of love, not its opposite? B would still be a fucking moron, but A had known and been reconciled to that for some time. What A won't stand to be, in any of the infinite combinations of universes, is just another notch on the bedpost of a man who likes to work his way through his own personal harem of inferiors, and has somehow decided to tackle Rush next.

Rush gives a twisted smile at his own thoughts. He hasn't revised these assumptions for some time, but it's clear by now that Young is not quite the player he had at first taken him for. Indeed, with a wooing technique that consists of lurking hopefully in corners of the room wearing a pleasant expression, Rush is surprised he'd ever managed to get into the tangle he had at all.

“So,” he challenges at last, backed by the empty bridge and the seethe of stars outside it, delighted again. “Is this your way of showing an interest? Mooning around me like a big shy girl, waiting for me to notice?”

Young has an impervious way with insults that Rush secretly admires. He just lets it roll straight off, and then he smiles. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. So how about it? Do you want to go get a drink?”

The still-room is full as it always is, full of noise and heat and the crush of people babbling. He can't hear himself think in there, so he picks up his ration of alcohol and they go to the observation deck with it. There's a couple of soft chairs around a table there where they can be private while still being observed - in case it all goes south.

He doesn't think it will, though. They've both got murder in them, but it's sleeping now, a mutual acknowledgement that they are each other's match and equal. It's a very different equality than that he had with Gloria - who surpassed him in poise and social graces and ability to navigate the ridiculous terrain of academic politics. It's different again to the equality of mathematical genius that he had with Mandy. But it's important nevertheless. He couldn't be with anyone who couldn't defend themselves against him, who didn't have an ability to push back.

Young's way is terrifying, but – in retrospect – Rush was pretty terrifying himself in those days, ablaze with certainties about which he no longer feels quite so sure.

"I didn't mean that badly, you know," he starts, pouring them both a shot of Brody's best. "Evelyn was a big shy girl, and I liked her very much."

Young laughs and turns to look out of the wide window as though he's peering into the past. "I was - uh - pretty good looking in my youth,” he explains. “And an air force pilot. That's got its glamour, I guess. Pretty much all I ever had to do was turn up."

It's a strange thought. And it's strange because Rush is simply not in the habit of finding Young desirable. Yet when he looks, when he takes notice, he increasingly does.

At first, it had to be translated through Evelyn. It took his noticing her bold, unhurried, self-contained grace, like the grace of a warship, like the grace of Destiny herself, big, strong and beautiful, before he could see it in Young. But he keeps catching glimpses of it even now, in the turn of Young's shoulder or the edge of his smile, the way he moves and talks. He's slowly coming to comprehend it like learning a new language, and he _loves_ learning new things.

"And you..." Young carries on, with a warm dart of a look, half amusement, half admiration, that Rush likes very much. "I'd be surprised if you ever looked up from your notebooks long enough to put in a pursuit. But having met Nicola, I'm sure that wasn't a problem for you either. I bet you were fighting them off with a stick."

Actually, as with other subjects, Rush had been eager to explore this one as exhaustively as possible. Before Gloria there had been quite a succession of experiments, boys, girls, people who weren't either. Dangerous times, and he had more than once been beaten or bottled for his exploits. But exhilarating times too. Looking back, it's possibly a surprise at how thoroughly, how stodgily, he had settled into middle aged, middle class heterosexuality as if he'd always lived there.

Not permanently though, apparently. "To be frank, I rarely put up much of a fight."

"No?" Young leans back in his chair and drapes an arm along the back of it. His eyes gleam. "God, I bet you were a tearaway. Three days in a coma... She kissed me, you know. Nicola."

Did she indeed? Rush is not amused about that. She should bloody well keep to her own universe and stop playing about with his. "I hope you told her where to get off."

"I was too surprised to do anything."

Really this is not an irrational thing to want. Over the past three years, Young has succeeded in achieving a stranglehold over the crew that Rush doesn't think he has a chance of breaking any more. Young supports his mission, and - being the sap that he is - would probably do so all the more strongly if it was a case of being supportive to his partner.

Plus, Young does not seem like the kind of man who would be physically violent to his lover. Taking that threat off the table more permanently would make Rush's life considerably easier in many ways.

And he's very alone. He's been very alone for such a long time. At nights, even the mission is not enough to warm the cold isolation of his bed. He'd have taken Evelyn there without a second thought, and they are the same person, so...

"Evelyn's got her work cut out for her with that one," says Young, and stretches out his leg under the table. It brushes against Rush's, comes to rest, calf against calf, and an odd kind of golden feeling wells from the touch and sets Rush gently aglow.

"Nonsense," he sits further forward to bring his knee into contact with Young's. From their fights, he can already imagine how it might go, and the thought makes him catch his breath. "I'm quite sure it's the other way around, having to deal with exes and babies and all that idiocy."

Sometimes Rush has thought that he had a kiss of death, what with Gloria... and Mandy, and... But if it did happen, it couldn't happen to a better person than Young. Besides, if Death did come for Young, he has the feeling that Young would just smash its head into the floor a couple of times and walk away.

"It was interesting meeting them. They seemed to be doing pretty well, in fact. Got more of a handle on things than we have." Young slides a boot tip smooth and firm up the back of his leg, and it reminds Rush of being wild and sixteen and tangling with the boys on the street, and the reckless thrill of not quite knowing if they would kiss you or kill you, and being afire to find out.

"Well, I don't care to be outdone by myself," he says, breaking out into a grin he doesn't think he's worn for thirty years. "Do you?"

Young stands, checks to make sure they're not being watched and then offers him a hand. "Nope. We should, ah... we should get to work on catching up."

He's not in favour of touch as a generality, but in this context there is a purpose to it. Rush takes Young's outstretched hand and is startlingly aware of it, the shape and strength and callouses, the warmth, as if the volume on his senses has been turned up. In the mere physical sense, it augurs well for what is about to come.

Evelyn and Nicola seem to have made this work. Which means there is no cause to suppose it will be a disaster for them either. Admittedly, as women, Evelyn and Nicola have a training in humility and cooperation that neither he nor Young have ever had. He and Young have masculine pride and testosterone to contend with. But he can't imagine Evelyn taking that as an excuse, and obscurely, he doesn't want to let her down.

Besides, even if all that _passion_ just leads straight to nuclear war, he's going to do it anyway. Because he wants to, and that's the only reason that counts.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Burn Down The Final Wall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3487472) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)
  * [Distance Erased](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634440) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)
  * [Borrowed Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4294434) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)
  * [Reach Out, Hold Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5371898) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)
  * [Followed and Led](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5490824) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)
  * [Only My Hands](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173177) by [whereismygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden)




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